Nutrition for Healthy Hair

Abstract

The history of nutrition dates back to the dawn of humanity. Diet was largely determined by the availability and palatability of foods, and the teachings and techniques that were used to obtain and prepare food came from trial and error, and an incredible capacity of human inventiveness. “Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat” is a saying attributed to Socrates. Hippocrates of Kos was among the first to establish the role of diet. He proposed lifestyle modifications, such as diet and exercise, to treat diseases, and is therefore often quoted with “let food be your medicine.” And yet, there is hardly another field with so much prejudice, misconception, and debate as diet and health, let alone hair health. In his publication “How Doctors Think,” Jerome Groopman ultimately states that “Aside from relatively common dietary deficiencies—lack of vitamin B12 causing pernicious anaemia, or insufficient vitamin C giving rise to scurvy—little is known about the effects of nutrition on many bodily functions.” The fact is that quantity and quality of hair are closely related to the nutritional state of an individual. Before 1785 many scholars had published their opinions on how food was used in our bodies, but it was only with the “Chemical Revolution” in France at the end of the eighteenth century, with its identification of the main elements and the development of methods of chemical analysis, that old and new ideas began to be tested in a quantitative, scientific way. Essential studies into the chemical nature of foods followed. Following the groundbreaking observations of naval physicians James Lind from the British Navy and Kanehiro Takaki from the Japanese Navy on what was to later be discovered to be vitamin C and vitamin B1, further research followed into the area of the vitamins. All vitamins were identified between 1913 and 1948, ushering in a half century of discovery focused on single-nutrient-deficiency diseases. Accelerating economic development and modernization of agricultural, food processing, and food formulation techniques globally reduced single-nutrient-deficiency diseases. In response, nutrition science shifted to the research on the role of nutrition in complex noncommunicable chronic diseases. Among the most important scientific development of recent decades are the design and completion of multiple, complementary, large nutrition studies, including prospective observational cohorts, and randomized clinical trials.